Clifford Geertz read cockfights and bazaars the way critics read novels
For thirty years no American cultural anthropologist was judged more influential than Clifford Geertz. He built that reputation on patient fieldwork in Javanese towns, Balinese villages and Moroccan bazaars, turning a cockfight and olive groves into lessons on how to read a culture like a text.
Geertz was born in San Francisco in 1926 and served in the US Navy from 1943 to 1945. He took a philosophy degree at Antioch College in Ohio in 1950, then trained as an anthropologist in Harvard's interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations under Talcott Parsons and Clyde Kluckhohn.
His first long fieldwork, with his wife Hildred and funded by the Ford Foundation and MIT, took him to Mojokuto, a small upland town in Java, where from 1952 to 1954 they lodged with a railway worker's family and studied religious life. After further visits to Bali and Sumatra he completed his doctorate in 1956. At the University of Chicago from 1960 he widened his Indonesian work, publishing Religion of Java and Agricultural Involution, and in the mid-1960s moved to Morocco, gathering material on bazaars, mosques, olive growing and oral poetry; Islam Observed compared the two Muslim societies.
In 1970 he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, staying as professor until 2000 and then as emeritus. The Interpretation of Cultures, a 1973 collection of 1960s essays, became his best-known book and recast him from Indonesia specialist to theorist. It is associated with his analysis of the Balinese cockfight and his essay on thick description, drawn partly from the Moroccan data. He also edited Myth, Symbol, Culture, a showcase for symbolic anthropology.
Later work leaned toward essays, including reviews for the New York Review of Books, reflections on how ethnographers write in Works and Lives, and the memoir After the Fact. He collected around fifteen honorary doctorates, among them Harvard and Cambridge, and joined the National Academy of Sciences. After divorcing Hildred he married the anthropologist Karen Blu. He died in 2006, and one final essay collection appeared in 2010.
Source: Clifford Geertz
